The hidden cost of heroism

Chub's marriage had broken up recently, and he'd been bruised enough to seek out his girlfriend from a quarter-century ago. Peggy was also finalizing an ugly divorce, and they'd begun calling each other all the time, exploring what they'd learned from one bad relationship and revealing what they were seeking in the next. In the process, they discovered that their romance was quickly rekindling.

"But I have to have 100 percent commitment," Peggy recalls warning him.

Chub had to think that over. "One hundred percent — that's a lot," he finally said. "You have to keep a little for yourself. That's what I've learned."

What? Peggy was baffled. Chub was afraid of commitment? The guy who ignored the swinging '60s to go to military school and who still called his mom every day? Peggy didn't get it: If he really cared about her, wouldn't he at least lie about his fear?

But gradually she began to understand. In their long, late-night conversations, Chub had made it clear that if his personal and professional life had taught him anything, it was that little risks have big consequences. He'd committed himself to marriage, and he'd been hurt. He went to work every day and saw bankers ruined for life because they'd tried to get away with "harmless" little side deals.

No thanks; not for Chub. He wasn't going to risk more pain by committing himself heart and soul too soon, and he wasn't going to fib about it. If there was a reason he felt stretched too thin right now, it was because he was obsessed with avoiding mistakes.

But just when Chub was steely focused on doing things right, he might have made the biggest mistake of his life.

A band of brothers
We don't woo our wives with clubs. We don't leave old folks on ice floes. And maybe the time has come to quit diving into rip tides to save people we don't know. We've outgrown a lot of survival-of-the-fittest strategies, and risking our lives for strangers might be one of them.

"It could very well be that altruism is a behavior that has been held over from a much earlier time," explains Lee Dugatkin, Ph.D., a professor of biology at the University of Louisville and the author of The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness. Specifically, a time when the only people you saw your entire life were the members of your own hunter-gatherer clan.

"If you saved someone's life under those conditions, you were very likely saving a blood relative," says Dugatkin. "It is not easy to come up with a viable argument to explain the evolution of self-sacrifice for strangers. That may be the reason these stories make the headlines, because they're so unnatural to us. It tells us something about our predisposition that we're always surprised when someone jumps on the subway tracks to save a little girl."

Extreme heroism is so counterintuitive, Dugatkin points out, that it demands special training. "Look at the military," he says. "The armed forces always use the language of kinship to condition soldiers to think of one another as family. They're not 'strangers'; they're a 'band of brothers.' " Consider the first things you experience in boot camp: Your head is shaved, and your clothes are replaced with olive drabs. Instantly, you're identical to all your brothers.

And as if to prove that point, Andrew Carnegie's archives have one more clue to reveal about the mystery of heroism: The overwhelming majority of heroes come from small towns. Roughly 80 percent hail from places where people still see themselves as kin: places like Mattoon, Illinois.

What a hero leaves behind
So when that life ring fell into Arland's hands, something irresistible might have clicked inside. Beneath his happy-go-lucky, get-along exterior, a perfect hero lurked: a small-town guy who'd also been drilled in the Citadel's band-of-brotherhood ethic. "Always take care of your people first," Frank Webster recalls of their Citadel training. "That's an unbreakable code. You go last. Your people go first." Chub didn't have to see the survivors across the wreckage from him to know they weren't strangers, they were family.

The only thing that spoils that heartwarming story, though, is this: Chub already had a real family, and they were left with a steep price to pay for his decision.

"It killed my grandfather," says Leslie Williams, Arland's daughter. Chub's dad was in the midst of battling lung cancer when he received word of his only son's death. In the fairy-tale version, the hero's father would be overwhelmed with pride, but in the real- life version, Arland's father never recovered from the news. Within 18 months of Arland's death, his dad was gone, too.

Chub's mom lived on, but she wasn't the same. She was much quieter, as if nursing a bruise that wouldn't heal. Arland's son — Arland III, known as Trey — was 15 when his dad died. Trey was just starting to get into trouble then, nothing that some Mattoon values and a little Citadel-style discipline wouldn't cure. But Chub wasn't there to provide either. "It was hard for him. Trey lost his dad at a difficult age," says Leslie. "Dad's discipline would have made a difference." Trey never seemed to find his way. He later married and divorced but never had any children. Cancer took him by the time he was 37.

Leslie is the last of the Williamses, and her one unfortunate legacy has been the lingering sting of guilt. She was 17 when her father died, and she was going through the feelings every teenager experiences during a divorce in the family. Most kids have a chance to work those things out and reconcile with their dads. To this day, Leslie wishes she would have had more years to know him as an adult.

"It's a constant presence in my life," she says of losing her father. She's even gone to work in his old office: Leslie is now the Web director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. She is also the single mother of two wonderful adopted daughters, ages 10 and 3. She hasn't shown her daughters the tape of their grandfather's last minutes. Not yet. She's not sure at what age they would understand. Leslie respects what her father did, she really does. But ask her how she feels, and her honest answer is this: "Why didn't you just hang on?"

Surprisingly, the Citadel seems to reflect that same mix of pride and anguish over Arland's death. It has created an Arland D. Williams Society, which chooses members not from alums who lose their lives for others but who live for others. Two new members are chosen each year based on their lifelong social service. And the first recipient of the honor? Chub's easygoing former roommate, Frank Webster, who has spent decades helping the infirm.

Today, there's also an Arland D. Williams Jr. Bridge, in Washington, D.C.; an Arland D. Williams Jr. Elementary School, in Mattoon, Illinois; and an Arland D. Williams, Jr. Endowed Professorship of Heroism at the Citadel. There's an Arland Williams folk song and a made-for-TV movie. There's even an Arland Williams shrine created by a woman in Japan. But as Darwin predicted, there is no Arland Williams IV.

And there never will be.

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